Goethe

In your compilation of the film festivals of 1997 (Jan. 12), you have erroneously located the hosting city of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as Prague, Czech Republic. The hosting city is, in fact, Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad in English and German), Czech Republic, which is located two hours west of Prague in western Bohemia. Karlovy Vary is much smaller and quainter than Prague, but none the less famous for being one of the most popular and elegant spa resorts for the likes of Beethoven, Goethe and Marx.

June 30, 1994 | Jim Washburn, Jim Washburn is a free-lance writer who contributes regularly to the Times Orange County Edition.

I went to bed last night wondering just what I'd be writing about in this column today. That might seem a bit last-minute, but I find a deadline is like a thick window I can't see through unless my head is slammed right up against it. Shortly before I woke up this morning, I had a nightmare. I was in a college class and about 15 years older than anyone else in it.

The Case for Books Past, Present, and Future Robert Darnton PublicAffairs: 210 pp., $23.95 It's all a bad dream. You wake up in a strange world with no books, no paper, only screens. The monitors, like the fabled red shoes, cannot be turned off. Book historian Robert Darnton to the rescue: Blam! Take that, Google, you blood-sucking monopoly! You fiend! Kerpow! Down go librarians who hope to save space by throwing away newspapers and even books, relying on not-so-reliable microfilm.

WORKS that change how literature is written are few and far between. Georg Buchner's novel "Lenz," published posthumously in 1839, is one of them. Though Buchner died, unknown, of typhus at 24 in 1837, the Modernist emphasis on interiority he established runs straight through to Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hemingway, Camus, Beckett, W.G. Sebald and Elfriede Jelinek. Without Buchner, fiction as we know it would be unthinkable. Works that change how literature is written should also change the way we read.

Minna Bernays may not be a household name, but her brother-in-law -- Sigmund Freud -- is. Bernays, who was rumored to have had an affair with the psychoanalyst at the end of the 19th century, is the main character of Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman's 2013 historical novel “Freud's Mistress.” Novelists can't seem to leave Freud and his entourage alone. D.M. Thomas had him on the brain in “The White Hotel” and “Lying Together”; Freud also inspired Thomas' “Eating Pavlova” and Goce Smilevski's “Freud's Sister”; and his wife, Martha, takes center stage in Nicolle Rosen's “Mrs.

November 3, 1991 | Dick Roraback, Roraback is a member of the Book Review staff.

Ward Just doesn't make it easy for himself. He has chosen as his protagonist a translator, the antithesis of action, of imagination. Further, he makes the translator German, with all the baggage that implies. Lest we miss the point, Just saddles him with "a square head and broad shoulders," "deliberate movements," "a severe face without dance." Finally, Just takes the boy out of Germany, but . . .

A leading German newspaper has reported that revered German literary hero Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was secretly exhumed about 30 years ago. The macabre revelation came as Germany prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth on Aug. 28. Scientists in the former East Germany removed Goethe's remains from his tomb in 1970 to preserve the skeleton. They enclosed it in foam before returning it to the tomb.

They have boarded airplanes with a human brain as carry-on luggage, turned a bullet-riddled lawyer into a Popsicle and employed a dog surgeon to operate on people who want to conquer death. Now, after two decades of freezing heads and whole bodies for possible future revival, they have fled California. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's leading cryonics company, has packed up its icy clientele and moved to Arizona.